Empathy can be a Weapon as well as a Comfort

Empathy can be as simple as a speaking glance that says "I heard you." Or it can begin by asking someone Why do you feel that way?, then listening without making them feel judged. We usually use empathy to acquire allies, but it's equally important to understand the feelings of our competitors and enemies. If someone is trying to stop you, slow down and consider what they're feeling. Better yet, ask them.

Digital Tonto: How Empathy Can Be Your Secret Weapon, 2023-Apr-2 by Greg Satell

One thing I learned over many years living in foreign cultures is that it’s important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

It is only through empathy that we can understand motivations—for good or ill—and design effective strategies to build shared purpose or, if need be, design a dilemma for an opponent. To operate in an often difficult world, you need to understand your environment. That’s why building empathy skills can be like a secret weapon.

Taste and Complexity

W. David Marx is doing an excellent job of explaining diversity of taste. When I take a relatively uneducated friend to an art museum, I'm often stumped to explain my taste.

Culture (An Owner's Manual): Three Ways of Enjoying Music (and the Reverse Snobbery of Ultra-Poptimism), 2023-Feb-21 by W. David Marx

Educated listeners grow bored with sensuous music with low syntactical complexity. They seek out music that offers new emotional and intellectual experiences, which require syntactical innovations that only experts can provide.

Where syntactical innovations are too complicated or alien, they often interfere with the immediate sensations of music and become unpleasant for less educated listeners. Herein lies the basic conflict between the two groups.

I'm not hiring. Scammers are using my name.

I've seen a job listing saying that I'm hiring... it's a scam! Please do not click the links.

ProPublica: Scammers Are Using Fake Job Ads to Steal People’s Identities, 2021-Oct-26 by Cezary Podkul

The U.S. Secret Service, which investigates financial crimes, also confirmed that it has seen a “marked increase” in sham job ads seeking to steal people’s personal data, often with the aim of filing bogus unemployment insurance claims.

 

Building empathy as a skill

I have always thought about empathy as a trait people have in varying degrees, but now I see that it really is a skill you can build by being curious, then connecting with people who are different from yourself. 

Adweek: Advertising Has a Crisis of Apathy and Otherness, 2020-Jun-8 by Yusuf Chuku

The answer to the problem of otherness is not sameness; it’s connectedness. Immersive, deliberate and compassionate connectedness. A connectedness between people that’s embodied in a willingness to embrace empathy. A connectedness to our cultural history, and by that I mean a relearning of American history. And a desire to see new faces connected to leadership in the C-suite.

So how do we embrace empathy? We need to understand that empathy is a skill and, like any skill, it takes practice to get better. We need to forget what we think we know about people and be genuinely curious about them. We need to recognize and set aside our own biases and judgment in order to see the world from another perspective.

To make a contribution: don't try to fit in

I love the idea of being the lone dissenter so other people have an opportunity to dissent as well.

The Atlantic: The Perks of Being a Weirdo, 2020-Apr by Olga Khazan

Psychologist Solomon Asch is famous for his 'conformity experiments,' but he also studied how dissenters influenced group behavior.... Having just one person who broke with the majority reduced conformity among the responses by about 80 percent. Perhaps the participants in those trials felt as though they and the dissenter could at least be weird together. Interestingly, they were less likely to conform even if the dissenter disagreed with the crowd but was still wrong. The dissenter appeared to give the participants permission to disagree. ...

In a small study, Rodica Damian, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Houston, and her colleagues had college students engage in a virtual-reality exercise in which the laws of physics didn’t apply. In this virtual world, things fell up instead of down. When compared with another group that performed an exercise in which the laws of physics functioned normally, those who had the physics-warping experience were able to come up with more creative answers to the question “What makes sound?”... Damian has a theory she’s researching: that all kinds of unusual experiences can boost creativity. 

What kind of mistake do you want to make?

Mistakes are a chance to collect information. Plan them carefully. 

New Statesman: It’s impossible to live in a state of error-free perfection: the trick is to make the right mistakes, 2019-Jan-29 by Ian Leslie

On an individual level, it can be liberating to accept that the whole trick of life is deciding how, not whether, to screw up. A student may do better in an exam once she feels that nobody is expecting her to answer every question correctly. Every day, somebody starts a new business, fully aware that it may go kaput, having weighed that possibility against another error: creating the regret that comes from never trying in the first place.

When theatre directors give pep talks to their ensembles before an opening night, they often point out that the odd mistake is inevitable. They do so because the worst mistake of all would be for the performers to be so cautious that they forget to put their heart and soul into what they’re about to do. Well, your audience awaits. If it’s not too late to ask, what mistakes do you plan on making in 2020? 

Considering where to learn about startup success

Since I've started joining startup communities, I've be deluged with opportunities to hear how founders "made it," as well as offers of mentorship from people with a lot less experience than myself. Granted, I'm not a successful entrepreneur, but I have a deep and flourishing understanding of how businesses succeed. And it's not by imitating someone else's success. 

Farnam Street: Survivorship Bias: The Tale of Forgotten Failures, 2019-Dec by Shane Parrish

Considering survivorship bias when presented with examples of success is difficult. It is not instinctive to pause, reflect, and think through what the base rate odds of success are and whether you’re looking at an outlier or the expected outcome. And yet if you don’t know the real odds, if you don’t know if what you’re looking at is an example of survivorship bias, then you’ve got a blind spot.

Whenever you read about a success story in the media, think of all the people who tried to do what that person did and failed. Of course, understanding survivorship bias isn’t an excuse for not taking action, but rather an essential tool to help you cut through the noise and understand the world. If you’re going to do something, do it fully informed.